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Apple's iBooks EULA Drawing Ire
An anonymous reader writes in with one of many articles about the iBooks EULA, this time questioning whether it is even enforceable. Quoting: "The iBooks Author EULA plainly tries to create an exclusive license for Apple to be the sole distributor of any worked created with it, but under the Copyright Act an exclusive license is a 'transfer of copyright ownership,' and under 17 U.S.C. 204 such a transfer 'is not valid unless an instrument of conveyance, or a note or memorandum of the transfer, is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed.' When authors rebel and take their work elsewhere, Apple has, at most, a claim for breach-of-EULA — but their damages are the failure to pay $0 for the program."
First entry up on google for self publishing epubs:
http://www.lulu.com/
They even do paper versions.
Deleted
PDF is free and open now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pdf
Relevant snippet:
"While the PDF specification was available for free since at least 2001,[4] PDF was originally a proprietary format controlled by Adobe, and was officially released as an open standard on July 1, 2008, and published by the International Organization for Standardization as ISO 32000-1:2008.[1][5] In 2008, Adobe published a Public Patent License to ISO 32000-1 granting a royalty-free rights for all patents owned by Adobe that are necessary to make, use, sell and distribute PDF compliant implementations.[6]"
Really. It's even in the fscking EULA:
"Title and intellectual property rights in and to any content displayed by or accessed through the Apple Software belongs to the respective content owner."
Note the "content". Software (as iBooks Author) creates files or documents or "works", but not content. Authors create content. This content is yours.
If you think this is word-wanking, try the following gedankenexperiment:
You write a book using MS Word for the text, Photoshop for the illustrations and you even buy some high-quality photos for it. Then you import all of that into iBooks Author to create a book for the iBook Store. You also import all of that into InDesign (or whatever software you bought for creating ePubs) to sell elsewhere.
How should the book you created from *your* content be affected by the iBook Author EULA? It isn't. Apple even spells this out in the EULA. The content of course is yours to sell.
I'm not an Apple fanboi and I don't like Apple very much but I think iBook Author and the iBook store is a good idea. I also don't like the EULA terms very much but they are not what some people would like you to think they are. If you want to sell the file created with iBooks Author you can sell it only via Apple. But if you want to sell your content in that book elsewhere you can still do that.
Meanwhile I just hate that kind of sensational journalism that ignores facts and just wants to drive page-views by fueling hate and fury. Really, I'm sick of it. Be rational and READ THE FUCKING EULA.
You're still missing the point.
If Apple doesn't publish you. GAME OVER. The only way to get your book out there after that is to give it away...for free!
Nonsense. You only can't publish the very file created by iBooks Author elsewhere. The content you wrote is still yours.
This is even spelled out in the EULA later on. Of course this is desperately ignored in that article and everywhere else.
Exactly. This entire post is based on a false premise that you are giving away your rights to your content by using their authoring tool when in fact the only limitation is that you cannot take content created in iBooks Author and sell it elsewhere using the iBooks format. If you want to sell it outside of the app store, create it in a different format.
This article is a lot of nothing..
Sole commercial distributor, not sole distributor. The quote is a misstatement of the policy.
And this only refers to the binary produced by the iBooks Author program. Apple makes no claim on your content, you are free to produce other ebooks using different tools and distribute elsewhere.
Calibre is free and does exactly what you specify; I can write something in plaintext, in notepad, and have Calibre convert it into various formats for me, automatically on a per-device basis; so for device A I might have it auto-export as .epub, and for device B as .pdf and so on and so forth.